Last week’s announcement that Antony Sher has a terminal illness hit me hard, like a punch to the stomach. Why this piece of black news, coming as it does amidst so much disease and death in this Covid-era, should have felt so very upsetting, is harder to know. Or maybe not. Because maybe it’s less a matter of knowing and more a matter of feeling.

I’ve never met Antony Sher, not really, not in the sense of having a conversation. He penned a small contribution to my first book, I once had a quick half-introduction across a pub table (at which I wasn’t sitting), and have been in the same room as him at press conferences a fair few times.

But I’ve long felt his presence in my life. As a theatre-obsessed kid, I would pore over his published journal Year Of The King before I ever saw him act (not counting his hotel porter in Superman II). Back in 1984, I was nine and Sher was literally the poster-boy for British theatre - images of his dynamic, crutch-wielding Richard III were everywhere. His Royal Shakespeare Company performance won him an Olivier Award, sure, but more; it had seemingly adrenalised the entire theatrical establishment. Growing up in Bournemouth, dreaming of Shaftesbury Avenue, I thrilled to reports of this sensational, era-defining turn. Through Year Of The King, which charted the journey of that production, I was also introduced to Sher’s back-story - how he came to the UK as a South African Jew, seeking out his famous playwright-cousin Ronald Harwood, and his early theatrical adventures.

Three years later I was taken to Stratford to finally see him on stage, as Shylock. I wasn’t disappointed - that great performance stays with me. As does his savage-funny Tamberlaine, his unhinged Leontes, his - so many more. All the way up to the last time I saw him on stage, as a Falstaff whose humanity overspilled his guile. Sher can connect psychotic characters to an artery of intellectualism, just as he encircles spiritually noble ones with a dangerous, bristling zaniness. He has always been an original and that’s why he has blazed so brightly. It’s what we think of when we read accounts of iconic classical actors of the past - Kean, Irving, Garrick. Each was an original. What they could do, what they could bring to a classic text, was entirely specific to themselves, and had never been seen before.

Sher has that quality, and it has made our theatrical world - our mirror in which we view our times - that much brighter. So the prospect of his loss (long may it be delayed) is a dulling of our own era.

So yes, this news is a matter of feeling. But there’s another nagging feeling as well - a nervousness that Sher is among the last theatre-grown stars we shall see. Most of those who have followed him are less stage stars than they are stars on stage, ticket-selling names who have made their names through Game Of Thrones or whichever screen franchise is of the moment. And even when that hasn’t been strictly true, our own definitions of stardom have changed. We no longer widely celebrate actors if stage is all they’ve done. Look at Ralph Fiennes who, similar to Sher, had early success with the RSC - he didn’t become famous until the movies found him. Or David Oyelowo. Or Emily Blunt. Or Eddie Redmayne.

There are vanishingly few exceptions, one of them Sher’s contemporary, Kenneth Branagh. He did become famous from theatre, film only coming later. Branagh and Sher, in fact, emerged in that same 1984 RSC season, together with the late Roger Rees, when the company made a deliberate and cunning decision to massively promote three brilliant young talents. Sher played Richard, Branagh was Henry V, Rees was Hamlet. The press got behind them, audiences got excited, and critically, of course, all three were exceptional.

This is what companies like the RSC (currently led by Sher’s husband Greg Doran) must continue to do into the future - creating new theatre stars. Otherwise Sher’s generation may truly be the last to really get us excited about what’s happening on the boards. The last in which a young theatre geek in a small town on the south coast can be excited and inspired by what’s happening on stage, hundreds of miles away. And that feels truly a bleak prospect.